The Chinese believe only the devil but never God. As long as the Chinese are yearning for a benevolent despotism, unity, harmony and stability, as long as the Chinese refuse to pursue the eternal and universal human values of truth, justice, liberty and dignity, they will forever live in darkness and in a silent desperation. They will forever be despised and disdained by the freedom-loving people in the world. As long as Mao's visage and Qin Emperor's unity at any cost remain as pseudo-values among the Chinese, they will never have true self-esteem and respect. They will never have the respect of the world, no matter how much money and how much power they have. --- Kai Chen

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Dear Visitors:

In today's Los Angeles Times there is an article about how the Chinese still worship Mao and the symbols of despotism and tyranny. I now paste the article here for you to read.

I hope all of you reflect on how and why the Chinese worship tyranny but not freedom, worship devil but not God.

Best. Kai Chen

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[size=24]Mao marches on[/size]

Through all of China's changes, the former leader remains a ubiquitous icon.

By Philip J. Cunningham September 18, 2007

During a recent visit to Beijing, I was looking at the sky on a clear night when I was startled to see the ghost of Mao Tse-tung staring down at me. The legendary tyrant's mellow, moon-like visage sparkled above a spanking-new shopping center while a hidden PA system amplified his high-pitched Hunan accent: "The Chinese people have stood up!"

One of the urban wonders that tourists and journalists alike are sure to descend on during the run-up to the Olympic Games is The Place. This is an open-air concourse that runs like a slash through a modern shopping center not far from Tiananmen Square, covered by a dazzling LED screen the length of two football fields and suspended 80 feet above the ground.

Mao's space at The Place is both ironic and dead serious. Mao, who branded China with a sharp and cutting anti-capitalist philosophy, is now a brand name in his own right, bestowed with the pride of place in an opulent urban mall, occupying center stage in a slick piece of visual propaganda drawn from archival footage. The Mao show, exalting the lineage of China's Communist Party leadership as an important party congress approaches, is sure to stir a flutter of reflexive pride in the casual passerby, well-heeled shopper and barefoot rag-picker alike.

Deng Xiaoping, the late strongman who overturned Mao's legacy and put the workers' paradise on the road to being a shoppers' paradise, is conspicuous by his absence.

Mao is back, not with a vengeance but in an uncanny and pervasive way. Try to knock Mao down here, and he pops up there. The symbolic game of Whack-a-Mao has been going on for some time; his portrait transformed into avant-garde art, his Little Red Book -- real and counterfeit -- unloaded on hordes of undiscriminating tourists.

By and large, the Mao statues that were once so ubiquitous in Beijing are gone, but Mao never really went away. In fact, one can hardly make a purchase in China without seeing his dreamy visage, especially on the 100-yuan bill, the bill of all bills at a time when making money is truly the lifeblood of China.

The August song-and-dance extravaganza that began the one-year countdown to the 2008 Olympics was staged in the heart of Tiananmen Square, visually anchored by the brightly lighted portrait of the controversial chairman. It was choreographed with an uncanny resemblance to the revolutionary theater of the Cultural Revolution. The topsy-turvy terror of that political period produced far more heartbreak and destruction than good art, but the art lives on. So too does the Chinese ability to endure in silence injustices that cry out for a clear historical reckoning.

There have been periodic bouts of nostalgia for Mao before, none more potent than the spontaneous popular uprising at Tiananmen in 1989. The demonstrators, despite their media-pleasing democratic rhetoric, had a decidedly Maoist cast. No one understood this better than Deng, the man who ordered the crackdown in fear of being deposed in a second Cultural Revolution.

Both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, though anointed by Deng for succession, have done much to stabilize and secure Mao's reputation, in no small part to bolster their own communistic legitimacy while freeing themselves from the Dengist straitjacket.

Mao might have been a tyrant, as aloof as an emperor, but he won the civil war and united China, not unlike a ruthless predecessor he was said to admire. China's founding emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, was not a nice man by any reckoning, but he is remembered for uniting China and setting it on a course for prosperity. Every time we utter the word China -- "land of Qin" -- we inadvertently invoke the tyrant's legacy.

And so too will Mao's legacy be invoked again and again, rough edges gradually smoothed out over time, reduced to a rounded pebble in a turbulent, ever-changing stream.

Philip J. Cunningham, a professor of media studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, is a frequent commentator on Chinese television.